Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday January 02, 2014 @08:12PM
from the yo-bitcoin-imma-let-you-be-spent-but-coinye-is-the-best-crypto-currency-of-all-time dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "A bunch of anonymous developers are working on 'Coinye West,' a crypto-currency named after rapper Kanye West. Coinye West isn't an official production of Kanye West, and the developers are staying anonymous because they probably fear the inevitable copyright lawsuits. (Of course, if the currency hits the online market and proves a success, it's always possible the real Kanye West would drop any suit in exchange for a massive amount of Coinye West coins—every hip-hop artist on the planet might claim to drive a Maybach, but how many can claim a currency?) 'DROPPING JANUARY 11, 2014. 11 PM EST,' read a note on Coinyewest.com. 'No premine, no screwed up fake "fair" launches, shyster devs, muted channels, and f**ked up wallets,' it helpfully added. 'We will be releasing password protected, encrypted archives containing binaries and source for the wallet and daemon BEFORE LAUNCH, with the passwords to be released at the specified time.' Just to emphasize the supposed fairness of this particular crypto-currency, the note repeated: 'We will work with multiple pools to orchestrate a PROPER and FAIR release.' A chat room is available at irc.freenode.net. Technical details for the crypto-currency include: Algorithm: Scrypt; max Coins: 133,333,333,333; block time: 90 seconds; difficulty Re-Target Time: 12 hours; block Rewards: 666,666 COYE; every 100k blocks, the payout halves. In the future, will every major celebrity will have a crypto-currency named after him or her? And how long until Jay-Z decides to launch something similar?"

I know it's now a cliche to pontificate "Why is this on Slashdot", but seriously? This is not news for anyone, certainly not "nerds", and clearly doesn't matter. It's not even funny. This "story" would be more appropriate next April.

It proves that anyone can create a cryptocurrency based on whatever stupid meme they feel like, therefore all cryptocurrencies have no actual reason to have a value outside of the gullibility of their users.They're modern art.

Are you claiming that a bitcoin is impossible to copy? Perfect DRM? Or do you mean that a counterfeit would eventually be caught?It seems to me that if 2 people came to my house and I bought something off them with the same bitcoin it would be duplicated and until they had a network connection to verify the coin there are 2 in existence, then whoever connected to the network second would discover his coin is worthless.

This is like arguing that credit cards are terrible because someone could come to your house and you could pay them with a fake credit card on one of those carbon-paper imprint readers. Then they would get home and process the transaction and realize the number was fake.

That's absurd. It's not that credit cards are terrible, it is that the people in the story aren't set up to properly handle credit card transactions. That's why people only use those things in low-risk environments.

Can't happen. The two payment-accepters are in communication via the distributed blockchain. After a short time they would detect 'this coin has been spent twice' and not recognize the transaction. That's why it takes a couple of hours at times to make a bitcoin transfer - that's how long it takes for the whole network to reach a consensus on the coin's current status.

Once that becomes enough for somebody to believe it AND give something else of value in return, you have a working crypto-currency.

Whatever the detractors of Bitcoin have to say are moot at this point. I can mine a Bitcoin. I can exchange it for cash. That's real. It makes me want to look at just what the cost is in USD to produce a single bitcoin. At the moment I'm not actually convinced the ROI on all the infrastructure is worth it, but that's a

CoinYe West, like Dodgecoin, is intended as a joke rather than a serious currency. Something to have bragging rights over. It's like collecting trading cards: Occasionally they may trade hands for money, or even be used as a form of currency within a defined community, but that isn't their purpose

The US dollar does carry the signature of the Treasury secretary of the US government, and a big stick to whack you if you try to make one which looks the same.

North Korea has been printing US dollars for many years without consequence. That just could not happen with Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is like Bansky, You don't even know who started it but it's got value because it's an original concept. Copycats can be made by anyone with even less consequences.

I do agree that rip-off crap like Litecoin and all the other Bitcoin copies are cynical scams trying to rip off the success of Bitcoin. There is just no need for a clone of something that already exists like there is no need for 1s44c dollars.

I do agree that rip-off crap like Litecoin and all the other Bitcoin copies are cynical scams trying to rip off the success of Bitcoin. There is just no need for a clone of something that already exists like there is no need for 1s44c dollars.

In fairness, I'll agree with you completely that the alternates to BitCoin have indeed jumped the shark. But LiteCoin makes perhaps the single worst example of that, as it addressed a few very specific problems when it came out. Most notably, it used SCrypt rather

Like playing a game of poker and saying "Ok, red chips are worth $1, white chips $5, and blue chips $10". Even the US dollar is this way -- its value is very much arbitrary.

Now just because it is only worth whatever you think its worth does not necessarily make it worth nothing.

No, you can't. Fiat currencies are backed by the will of countries or large organizations, often with armies/guns to support their decisions. That some fiat currencies are effectively worthless says more about the country/organization than it does about fiat currencies in general.

Sure a crypto currency could be used as the main currency of some large organization, but until then they all have very little intrinsic worth and no guarantee of guns and/or a large populace to back up their worth.

Exactly. Until someone is willing to exchange something of real value or cash for a crypto currency then it is still worthless. I can't even find someone to give me real money in exchange for bitcoins.

To really understand why this is wrong, you have to fundamentally understand what a fiat currency is. It's more or less simply a store of value.

Take for example the ruble after the collapse of the USSR. Supposedly communist right? Well, people had already been trading in currencies (sorry but Marx is wrong and always will be wrong, no matter how hard you try, private property and therefore money will never go away) and during the lifespan of the USSR that was the ruble. However when the USSR collapsed, the ruble went with it. People still needed to have a store of value until something came to replace it (barter only systems are simply incapable of fostering even seemingly dead economies -- liquidity is required for any kind of fast trading to occur, which barter does not provide.)

So what do they do? Well, turned out that people resorted to using cigarettes and vodka as currency. A single cigarette was the smallest division, a pack was larger of course, and a bottle of vodka was worth the most. You really didn't need a country or any large organization to keep this afloat and regulated. The problem with vodka and cigarettes is that they're rather easy to make, so a more well defined currency eventually replaced them (the new ruble,) but meanwhile the Russians didn't have to have somebody step in and say "use this."

This isn't the only example -- things that have been used as currencies also include coffee beans and shark teeth. These don't require governments to regulate the supply of, but they are inherently inferior because there's basically a limitless supply of them.

Bitcoin is the same deal as these, only it doesn't have the problem of being easy to create more (the total number of bitcoins that can exist already exist, by the way, just not all of them have been claimed yet.) Because of that, it is interesting to see where bitcoin will go that these previous currencies have not because they could not.

For currency you need something that can work in an offline / not live / store and call in later setting. Also physical paying is needed as well. there are shops that like cash over CC's / some places are cash only.

not talking about that offline talking about stuff where a place dials in at the end of day and or can work if say the network is down for a short time.What about a bus where it may pick up people in a data dead zone and wait for it to get a data link back before sending out the payment info.

No, you can't. This ill-informed troll keeps cropping up, but it's just a total misconception about how it all works.

Bitcoin is a vast distributed transaction log. The only thing you store in that wallet is a private key. The coins are out there in the transaction log. The key just identifies the ones that you own. Only the holder of the private key can produce a transaction signed with that key, which is what is required to transfer the coins to another holder.

So without a network connection bitcoin is useless? Not trying to troll but I've ignored bitcoin as it seems like a ponzi scheme to make the first movers rich and doesn't work without a good internet connection. Since I live where there is barely an internet connection it seems useless for me.

You can use commodities in a similar manner to currencies, but they are not currencies. The point of a currency is that it does not intrinsically have value in and of itself, but there is a strong belief by its users that it can be exchanged for something that does. This can be because a bank issued it and has a large pile of precious metal in its vaults that it promises to give you back in exchange, or because a country requires its citizens to use it to pay taxes and therefore there will be a demand for

A similar thing happened in Germany during/after WWI - they started using Notgeld [wikipedia.org] (literally, emergency money) for transactions since the official currency was either hoarded due to inflation or was needed for the war effort, or after the war was hyper-inflating itself to death [wikipedia.org].

This site [germannotgeld.com] has lots pictures of Notgeld - much of it was colorful and very artfully done. Flip open the twisties on the left and explore the Notgeld of the different cities.

How is money different than barter? It's just a good which has a generally agreed-upon worth.

There's a natural historical progression:1. Barter.2. Barter, but with some goods being recognised as 'standards of value' that everyone agrees upon. Typically precious metals and the like. This just makes trading convenient: If you want to trade your grain for leather, you don't need to worry about finding a tanner who needs grain or determining the fair trade rate for grain against leather. You just go to market,

There's no evidence of any historical societies that used barter. The first currencies were backed by far cheaper commodities, in particular by grain. Early metal-based currencies were just lumps of the metal. You made smaller denominations by cutting the coin in half, and you calculated its value by weighing it. This was problematic, because people could mix in cheaper metals. Later metal-backed currencies were effectively promissory notes: a bank kept the metal in its vault and promised to exchange a

You can't "hand out" Bitcoins. Bitcoin is a consensus. To subvert Bitcoin, you'd have to deploy computing power in excess of all that already spent on the blockchain, which is unlikely or impossible even for the US Government.

Your scenario where there are "fake" Bitcoins in "circulation" isn't possible because it's not cash. It's a transaction log, and because it uses the participation of all the Bitcoin peers to verify that it's legitimate, it's virtually impossible to forge, unlike physical cash.

No. Not after it is trusted. You could say it about the Zimbabwe dollar, in hindsight, but with the rest they are tokens of trust while an unbacked currency from nowhere doesn't have that.

With plenty of these things it's as if people have read part of Cryptonomicon about the fictional digital currency in that but haven't made it as far as the bit where it was backed up with vast quantities of gold. In that novel that was what made the digital cur

The protagonists in Cryptonomicon were planning on launching a new, private, currency backed by gold. They didn't ever work out that what they were really doing was attempting to launch an unregulated commodities exchange, which is something that most governments frown upon if the transaction volume exceeds a certain threshold.

Banks make loans in dollars. Banks are supported by the central bank in dollars. Banks are regulated in dollars and are given reserve ratios in dollars.The problem with Bitcoin as a currency isn't that you don't pay taxes in it, but that there's no functioning debt and bond market in it. A medium of exchange from one good to another is necessary but exchange from now and the future is critical.

That's what really makes it a problem. It will never be a currency. Bitcoin is more like a commodity like Rembr

Yes. Mod parent up. BTC suffers greatly because there it is not a medium of finance. It isn't necessary to have a government back it for that though.

"Banks" have been making loans long before the existence of central banks.

Fractional reserve banking was invented by goldsmiths. People would deposit their gold with smiths, who would issue script as receipts. Soon the script would circulate as being much more convenient than gold. The smiths realized that they could make loans against the gold they held. Ta-da

What is there to stop the Bitcoin exchange to start functioning like the goldsmiths you mentioned above?

Nothing, of course. You would have pre-central bank banking.

What if they start issuing "scripts" to facilitate trading, finance, debt ?

People participating in that scheme would be setting themselves up for some "interesting" (read: horrible) economic phenomena that have become very rare since the invention of central banking. There is a reason for this, of course, and maybe some gold bugs will be enlighte

One of the reasons that gold stopped being useful as a currency as that the amount of gold in circulation had no direct (or indirect) link to the amount of economic activity. The value of gold fluctuates too much compared to the value of the commodities that you would want ot buy with the gold. If you don't believe it, just look at what the price of gold has been doing over the last 10 years.

Bitcoin would be even worse since it is designed with very specific finite limits. Yes gold is also finite, but we have been mining the stuff for millenia, and we are still producing a fair amount of it.

A currency ideally need to be linked to the amount of economic activity to prevent wild swings in its value. So if the economy grows by 2%, you would want at least 2% growth in the amount of currency available. Bitcoin is unable to do that indefinitely. I would add that ideally, the amount of Bitcoin needed to increase to reflect the amount of transactions being undertaken in Bitcoin. Bitcoin does not do this.

Secondly, a currency needs a little bit of inflation. Bitcoin, at least at the moment, has the opposite of that. Because the value of Bitcoin has been rising, people are encouraged to hoard Bitcoin (you become wealthier just by holding on to them). You want the opposite. You want people to become a little poorer if they just hold on to their currency to encourage them to either spend of invest their money. This may be a little controversial, but there is no good reason why the intertemporal transfer of wealth should be costless.

Because of these flaws Bitcoin cannot be a currency. At best, it will be another commodity (like gold, or oil or copper), whose value swings wildly depending on the mood and the outlook.

A currency is both a medium of exchange and a store of value. The two things go hand in hand. A currency is what allows you to work work today, be paid in a month and spend your money a year later. If the currency can't store its value reliably, then people will not accept it, and it loses its ability to function as a currency.

Storing its value allows a currency to perform the inter-temporal transfer of wealth function.

Money supply is number of units in circulation x value per unit. You are just used to the left hand term varying, but mathematically the right hand term can do the varying while the left one stays fixed.

Basically, in your "equation", if I understood correctly, you are saying that the number

They'd have to have the same characteristics as cash, which include some measures so that you can be sure they aren't forgeries.

Alas, this is not possible with Bitcoin. As a transaction log, the only thing a "wallet" is is a private key. A paper wallet, for example, is just a particular encoding of that key on a piece of paper. The key is all that's needed to transfer the balance to another key - ie, spend the Bitcoin.

The person who created that wallet could easily have another copy of the private key, ther

So true. Money is loaned into existence. It seems like such a scam that a bank can create money out of nothing and then make a profit it. I wish I could figure out a business where I sell nothing, not even air, for a profit.

It only seems like a scam if you forget one of the main purposes of money: to provide liquidity. When a bank issues a loan, they require some capital in a non-currency form as collateral. This is typically (some proportion of) real estate or a company. The bank is effectively buying whatever the capital is, but giving you the option to have it back at a fixed price in the future. If the amount of currency in circulation could not expand to match the amount of capital then you have deflation and myriad o

The US dollar (or, more precisely, the US $20 or $100 bill) is the most fungible fucking thing on the planet Earth [wikipedia.org] right now. You can spend it or exchange it almost anywhere else on the planet for goods or services at a well established market rate. THAT'S WHAT A CURRENCY IS SUPPOSED TO DO.

I keep promising myself that I'll stop reading the Slashdot articles about Bitcoin, but I don't... that must be what the Dice Overlords are counting on in the hopes that their banner ads sparking my purchases of clever T-shirts or IBM... something... will finally pay off. Brilliant!

all cryptocurrencies have no actual reason to have a value outside of the gullibility of their users.They're modern art.

Really you can say the same thing about any fiat currency.

Uh, no, not realy. When it comes to fiat currency, it matters a great deal who declares it to be a currency. And this is in fact a practical matter. It makes a huge difference wether your currency is backed by the government of the US or that of Zimbabwe, say.

It does highlight the low barrier to entry for digital currencies, and shows how much of a "free market" it can be. Additionally, I do think that this shit will, at least in the short term, water down the "cryptocurrency" brand.

Your comment is antagonistic and arrogant, though, in that it assumes all users of a C.C. are gullible, rather than curious, hopeful, supportive, etc.

This. I see anyone who even got involved with Bitcoin to be an idiot in the first place because I still believe in the end it's going to get squashed by governments and declared null, void, and illegal. All these copycats? They just exist to troll the idiots who feel like they "lost out" on Buttcoin in the first place. It may as well be Pogs or Beanie Babies or Pokemon, it's just useless collectible nonsense. The only "winners" in this case are companies like AMD and Nvidia who are selling more GPUs to idio

Last time someone decided that the dollar wasn't worth using to sell his oil barrels, he had to hide in a hole while a few aircraft carriers and tanks showed him the error of his ways.A few hundred years earlier, a few people learnt about applied gravity (with their necks) for forgetting that people need enough buying power to stay peaceful. More recently, letting a currency slide down too far left a few not-so-nice people seize power and cause the wrong kind of economic boom,

No, not at all. That's why people believe in the dollar. The dollar is by no stretch of the imagination a normal fiat currency. Being backed by the strongest military power, being usef for reserve and for all worldwide oil trading puts it in a very unique position. There are many other fiat burrencies that people believe in for their day-to-day life that cannot depose a despot on the other side of the world. Even the Euro

No, not at all. That's why people believe in the dollar. The dollar is by no stretch of the imagination a normal fiat currency. Being backed by the strongest military power, being usef for reserve and for all worldwide oil trading puts it in a very unique position.

That's true, but it's the same kind of position as other fiat currencies.

There are many other fiat burrencies that people believe in for their day-to-day life that cannot depose a despot on the other side of the world.

Currencies don't do that. And we gave the Taliban a massive shitload of cash before 9/11. Whether intentionally or not, the US dollar funded 9/11. Before that, the US dollar created that despot. And by the way, the US dollar also created the last despot we went into that region to deal with. Then we brought him home drugged and tortured him so that he couldn't mount an effective defense in court. All paid for by the US dollar.

A large population that believes that the state has the right to collect taxes

A legal requirement that the taxes be paid in US dollars

The ability for the state to enforce this on people who choose not to pay.

The value of the US dollar is then backed by the requirement that some proportion of all income from US citizens and residents will have to be transformed into US dollars every year to pay taxes. In contrast, to create a new crypto 'currency', you need an off-the-s

Well, soulskill usually just tries to find way to justify the Communist Manifesto. But then again, I stopped reading him after I realized that there are plenty of people around, some even adults... perfectly eloquent ones.. who just don't have anything to say. So the only way they can make a living is by going through life as carnival clowns.

There are hundreds of alt-coins. The vast majority of them bring nothing to the table at all. This is another one of those coins, not even worth discussing.

Of the hundreds of alt-coins only two are really worth even discussing, Namecoin and Litecoin. Litecoin being the second largest market cap and being ASIC hostile keeps more of the coin generation distributed and still has enough security to be usable. Namecoin is a good idea but basically is an unfinished work.

This is yet another lame altcoin. It barely has a mention on bitcointalk. It's not really associated with someone famous. But it points the way to a potential success.

This could be a way to monetize fame. What if some major performer came out with an alt coin? They could anchor the coin value by making it exchangeable for concert tickets, downloaded tracks, and promotional merchandise. None of those things cost much to make, so they're not too vulnerable to price swings. The coin client can be combined with a music player/store client program, distributed with a few free tracks.

The problem with most of these alt coins is that you can't buy anything with them. If they were at least guaranteed to be tradeable for some music tracks and a T-shirt, there'd be some backing behind them.

There are a bare handful of performers who become icons of their generation --- and beyond --- and while the geek may remain eternally adolescent, artists age. The concert tour becomes more physically demanding and disruptive with each passing year.

For most of our history, the US has was extremely reluctant to issue coins, stamps or currency based on the image of any living person or anyone dead for less than 25 years. It kept the mint or the printing press non-partisan.

I know most of us don't give a care that yet another alt-coin is launching (and with a primary feature of a sound-alike name to a rapper).

But to me, this is part of a much larger question. How long will it remain feasible to create new alt-coins, and what does this do to the existing alt-coin economy?

Not more than 6 months ago, I was fairly convinced that Litecoin had an interesting and very viable creation. (You know, the ever popular quotes of it being the "silver to Bitcoin's gold", and the fact it stil

There *IS NOT* another "alt-coin" launching. This is a joke site that contains racist imagery, using Kanye West to bait gullible young people.

The site graphics open to a cartoon image of a "stereotypical" big lipped black man, presumably Mr. West. In the all black background, three sets of black-face eyes show up. The black background then drops to reveal three brack men in black KKK garb.

Nothing against Kanye West, but for when it matters, I'll take the gold standard of financial planning, Wu-Tang Financial [comedycentral.com], with a proven record of superior returns and risk mitigation.

...any form of fiat currency is as silly as the next. At least Kayne works for a living, art at that. What we all use now as money is setup and run by those that have the most money (imagine that) and are self-regulated. It's no different than Kayne sitting at his house with a special machine that he uses to print money, and handing it out to all of his friends to spend as they wish. This is exactly how the current monetary system works.

How is he a public figure? He is boring on every account. There is just nothing there. How? Wha? He couldn't even make impregnating a Kardashian controversial or even interesting. Now if you tell me that Dennis Rodman wants to have money named after him, I could see why. Money would be more popular if you named it after youtube kittens than Kanye West... or furniture. Ikea coin. How about that? At least it wouldn't be useless.